It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  You get so many francs a day for subsistence, and so many francs a night for accommodation, in France; so many lire a day for subsistence, and so many lire a night for accommodation, in Italy.  Ah yes, but you don’t know George when he is in action.  Not content with travelling in the dark, and so subsisting by night when he ought to be accommodated, and being accommodated by day when he ought to be subsisting, he could never make up his mind to stay in the same country for two days together.  As to his constant movements from one country to the other, three times he had supposed he had finished with Italy and was due back in France; each time he had got comfortably across the frontier into France he had been recalled to Italy.  Never once had he the sense to cross the frontier on the stroke of midnight, and so make a complete twenty-four hours of it on each side, and all the time the rate of exchange was varying by a fraction.  But, as George said, it wasn’t himself who was manipulating the rate of exchange as between the two countries, and courtesy to allied nations prevented him from manipulating the trains.

It was towards teatime when he satisfied me of his own innocence on these points; but don’t run away with the idea that by this time we were well on with the business.  We had barely as much as started.  How are you to fix the “date of journey” in such a manner as to give the traveller a clear night for accommodation in one country, or a clear day for subsistence in another, when he leaves his home at 5.15 P.M., arrives at the end of the first stage at 6.10 P.M., sleeps in a hotel till 11 P.M., gets in the train at thirty-five minutes past, crosses the frontier at 2 P.M. on the following day, arrives at his Italian destination at 5 A.M. on the morning after that, and then, if you please, goes to bed in another hotel?  Old soldier though I am, there didn’t seem to me to be a single line in a single column which I could satisfactorily fill in.  True, there was the space for “Remarks,” but our Mr. Booth was quite sure that my remarks were not what the Pay People called for.

By this time I was for giving in, but George was now the persistent one.  It was never his pocket he cared for; it was just one of his confounded principles not to be beaten by anything, not even an Army Form.  I expressed some surprise that in the course of this tour of duty he had not managed to find his way to America for an hour or two, if only to complicate my business with the dollar question...

I read the whole Form again, from start to finish, including the bit about vouchers being required for any unusual expenditure, such as cab-fares of over ten shillings.  I then told George to write down on a piece of paper how much money he had when he started on his silly journey, and how much he had in hand when he got back; to deduct the latter from the former and tell me the result; to go away, leave me to wrestle all night with the problem, come back next morning at nine, remain motionless and strictly in one country in the meanwhile, neither accommodated nor subsisting.  He gave me the figure, 173 francs, and never mentioned the subject to me again for days owing to the sullen fury he noted in my expression every time he cleared his throat to do so.